Now, six months into her job heading the commerce department, Decker and McCrory are planning some extensive surgery for the state's economic-development strategies. As in a complete makeover, with a newly created privately funded partnership overseeing the research and recruiting — and making recommendations on incentives — for the state. Another major change: revamping the line-up of regional economic-development partnerships by grouping the counties in different combinations and creating eight prosperity zones overseen by the new privately funded organization.

The shift would end state funding for groups such as the Charlotte Regional Partnership.

McCrory believes North Carolina suffers from what he calls a tarnished brand. During the campaign and since he became governor in January, he has called for a more focused economic-development strategy, along with a more aggressive marketing campaign to sell the state.

Decker, a former Duke Energy Corp. (NYSE:DUK) executive, came to Charlotte this week to speak to the uptown Rotary Club as part of her ongoing travels around the state to sell the new plan. During a 20-minute interview in an uptown hotel lobby, we discussed the proposed privatization plan, expected to take up to a year to put in place, and other aspects of rebuilding the economy. Following are excerpts from that conversation.

Why change the state's economic-development structure? How did that come about?

Well, I think for me, this idea had been talked about in the transition. And when the governor came and offered me the opportunity, he said, “You know, there’s some research that’s been done around the idea of a public-private partnership at the state level. I’d like for you to explore that.”

Quite honestly, I thought I would explore it for a year and then we would look at what we needed to do. But there are a couple of challenges that drove me to the decision that this was the right thing to do. One, there really weren’t solid, strong processes in place that were sustainable for the long haul. Processes had worked in the past, but coming out of this difficult economy, we’ve got to be positioned for a lot more proactivity and we’ve got to be a lot faster.

One of the things that a number of companies said to me that had not chosen to come to North Carolina, it was not that we didn’t have a great place to work, it wasn’t that we didn’t have a good mix of both cost of operation as well as good incentives. We were just too slow to get our act together.

If you think about how we’re structured, there are a lot of players in economic development. And so what became clear to me was we had to rethink processes and systems. And a lot of good people doing a lot of good work, but (there was) a lot of duplication. Some gaping holes of opportunity were there as well. For me, it was a process redesign and a reorganization.

Some folks have joked, “You want to move at the speed of business inside state government.” And I said, “That’s what I realized — you can’t do that.” (laughs)

So we’re going to move it outside state government to move a lot faster. Which we’ll be able to do with a new state organization.

What other models did you consider?

The state of Indiana has done this. Virginia has done it in part. Florida has done it in part. There are a number of states. State of Missouri, Michigan, all over the country. We’ve tried to pick the things that have done well, learn from the mistakes they have made and look at the model that could really work best for North Carolina. The approach we’ve taken is called a wholesale model. It means you basically take all of the sales and marketing for the state and put it into a private partnership.

One thing that’s different, folks are saying to me, “Well, we have all these nonprofits. What’s different about this?” The idea here is that you take those functions from commerce and put them into a private nonprofit and you contract with the state for specific job functions.

In our case, it will be new business recruitment, existing business support, travel and tourism marketing, small-business support and international trade and export. So, basically, that will be moved out into the private nonprofit, and then we’ll contract with them to do this work for the state of North Carolina. So, two-year contracts, performance-based. If it doesn’t work, you don’t renew the contract. Where in the past we did work with nonprofits from the public sector. We would basically do a grant-in-aid. So you make the grant and although the government might have some strategic placement on boards, there was really not a contractual relationship.

So if you’re with one of those regional partnerships, what would your advice be to them?

I think it is what they are doing and each of the partnerships is evaluating: What is the role we’re to play if the state is going to have a real clear focus on economic development for North Carolina? The state is once again going to promote North Carolina, which we haven’t done in many years as a state promotional effort on a significant level. As we renew that focus and get much more strategic and much more proactive in recruiting and existing business support, what is the role we need at a regional level? And I think there is a role there. It may involve regional marketing. It may involve regional policy, direction and planning. Here in Charlotte, the important role of transportation planning and policy around transportation. Each partnership is having to evaluate, if the state is going to take this posture, then what is the role we need to play? We encourage that.

How would Charlotte be affected, since much of the recruiting includes South Carolina counties across the state line?

I would think this region’s still going to embrace South Carolina’s upper state, just like I’m encouraging the folks in the western part of the foothills of North Carolina to think about the upstate of North Carolina as part of their region. We’re having the same conversation in the northeastern part of North Carolina as you look around the Chesapeake Bay and the northeastern counties — that’s a regional economy.

I’ve heard people say you run the risk of not having full public disclosure with a private group. How will that work?

We are writing into the legislation that we hope will be on the House floor this week that we will be subject to all the same records laws and ethics laws that the state of North Carolina is exposed to. I think that’s appropriate. That doesn’t concern me all. It’s only smart because we need to operate with full disclosure. Some of that is held privately as we’re negotiating with companies, but we’ll be subject to the same laws.

The governor has said many times that the brand of North Carolina is tarnished, that some things are broken. Does this tie into that?

This speaks right to it. One of the new positions in the organization will be a statewide brand and marketing manager, which we haven’t had in a long time, or maybe never had. And to focus on North Carolina as a brand. There’s so much good here. And I think through a down economy, the loss of textiles and furniture, we kind of lost our belief in ourselves. And part of that branding is an internal message to all of us who are North Carolinians and to those who weren’t born here but now call it home. There’s a powerful heritage here of hard work, of entrepreneurship, of ingenuity.

It’s a place where dreams take flight. It goes back to the Wright brothers. Think about Family Dollar’s story, Coke Consolidated’s story. Think about Bank of America. We’ve got to believe in that again.

What are the chief complaints with this switch to privatization?

I really don’t hear a lot of complaints from what you would call the opposition. I say that business has no (political) party. And it’s true because for the economy to grow, it’s going to take Republicans, Democrats and independents and everyone in between focused on the reality that we all believe job creation is important. We may all have different attitudes about how to go about that, but I’ll tell you, I’ve had great support from folks on both sides saying, “You’re right. There’s some change we need to make here. We do have to move faster.” Nobody argues that. When you look at unemployment in this state, we’ve been in doubled-digit unemployment in some counties for up to five or six years. I live in one of those counties (Rutherford). So Democrats and Republicans are saying something has to change.

The transition to a private model will be tricky, I’m told. Do you agree?

It is. That’s where the angst comes. But I don’t call that opposition. Because I really don’t hear those who are saying, “Don’t do this,” saying, “Don’t do something.” What we’ve placed in the bill is a six-month funding of the partnerships, so it gives us six months to focus on the strategic shifts we’ve got to make. Tony Almeida, the governor’s policy adviser, and I will be starting visits in each of the new zones in July. To sit down with local leadership, economic-development leadership, to talk about what’s working here, what’s not, what are the barriers to job growth, what are the things we aren’t doing we need to and really develop a zone-by-zone plan for how the state engages in that zone for economic growth. There will be issues of infrastructure in some areas. There will be issues around job type and work-force availability and work-force preparedness. So each one is going to look a little different. And the targeted industries are going to look different.

We’ve got to do that ground work in these first 90 days to get all those issues on the table and get for the first time a state strategic economic-development plan. We haven’t had one in about 25 years.

What will this look like?

There’s a slight shift we’re going to make. We’ve been heavy on the recruiting side — we’ll continue that — but we need to balance that with support for existing business. I’ll give you one example: Some of the folks that would be in this part of the state will be focused totally on helping businesses export what they’re already making. That’s one of the places we could put a lot of emphasis to ramp up this economy. We’re a state that makes a lot of things. Exporting is one way we can grow that base. Today we have a very small focus on that at the state level. There's great opportunity in agribusiness for export, but also in manufactured component parts, all kinds of things.

So in each of these zones we’ll have resources that are deployed across the state focused on job recruiting and also existing business growth.

How do you gauge success?

Net job growth for me is the big one. We’ve had net job decline now for five years. And I want to see that flip. We’ve got to recruit a lot of jobs to North Carolina and grow a lot of business. The other is reduction in unemployment rates, particularly in those counties where we’ve been in double-digit unemployment for extended periods of time. That fundamentally does take a different approach. It means digging in at a deeper level. Economic development is a local deal, but as a state, there is a lot we can do. We’re doing very targeted initiatives.

How do you think recruiters will work differently?

We’ll deploy resources around the state. For example, in some of the hardest-hit areas, I want some of those (recruiters) living in those areas that are responsible for this function. With local developers, local ownership, because you just see the perspective very differently. So they understand the culture, the people, the resources through our community colleges. That’ll be a strategic difference. We’ll have a very small team in Raleigh, but more of the new partnership’s employees will be across the state. It’s a big shift.

Any worries you will have an urban-rural tug of war with this system?

There will always be a tug of war, regardless of what we do. Here is what I hope will be the difference, and the proof will be in the pudding, right? And that is that once we have these plans done by zone, we’ll have folks targeting recruiting efforts on businesses for some of the hardest-hit areas. For example, in the eastern part of the state, we’ve got four of the largest military installations in the country, and there are a lot of related industries we need to be focused on for recruiting. We can also recruit a lot of businesses to this state who are interested in the skills that soldiers have as they come out of service. Eighteen thousand soldiers come out of Fort Bragg, honorably discharged — why let them get out of the state?